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Last week the Federal Labor Government's Special Minister of State, Gary Grayannounced the revised Federal Government policy on open source procurement.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin [cq] has ordered government agencies there to open-source software by 2015, according to translated documents. Putin's order, signed this month, follows news reports from October saying the Russian government was planning to drop Microsoft products in favor of a national open-source operating system based on Linux.

Index of FOSS design tools and templates

Peter Hughes, head of procurement agreements at Becta, told the BBC that more would be done. BETT 2009 An estimated 30,000 people visited BETT this year "As an organisation, we have been criticised for not adequately covering open source solutions and our predominance of proprietary solutions, such as those by Microsoft. "We have therefore responded to this pressure and in our role of strategy and delivery of technology in education, we've made an effort to stay balanced and have focused on facilitating effective choice for schools," he said.

So what happens when most of the residents of planet Earth carry a device that gives them instant access to pretty much all of the world's information? The implications-for politics, for education, for global economics-are dizzying. In theory, the mobile revolution could enable citizens to demand greater openness and accountability from their governments. The reverse might also be true: governments could more easily spy on citizens. "You also have the prospect of having 5 billion surveillance points," says Jonathan Zittrain, codirector of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Google Open Source YouTube channel

The FSF wasn't looking for money. The cost that comes with using free software code is that, if you sell or distribute programs or products that use the GPLed code, you have to share your modified code with its users. That's not much, but some companies, after adding their special sauce, don't want to share. That's a big, dumb mistake.

Brian Fitzgerald, Head of the Law School at Queensland University of Technology, will discuss the success of open source in the information technology world, and the lessons for other fields of science. Transcript and Audio available at this link

Linux 101 what's all the fuss. A very good way to get IPP and year 10/11 IT students to get some understanding of what open source is and what some of the advantages of it are. Lots of other videos there as well - backing up, buying a digital camera, how